There has been a new Director of Engineering at Facebook’s Blockchain Division

There has been a new Director of Engineering at Facebook’s Blockchain Division

Facebooks, the social networking giant has very recently promoted Evan Cheng, a senior engineer to become Director of Engineering for it very recently launched blockchain division.

Back in May, Facebook put together a team led by Coinbase board member and former president at PayPal, David Marcus, to explore the blockchain technology and the various uses and potentials of this technology in today’s day and age. The team had considered of less than a few dozen people that also included senior individuals from Instagram. The team has been asked to directly report to the CTO of Facebook, Mike Schroepfer.

Mark Zuckerberg earlier mentioned that he would make it an effort and a priority to learn cryptocurrencies this year. He also acknowledged the fact that one of the biggest problems that we face today is the centralized system and centralization. He also said that he would like to examine this technology and that he is willing to put the ‘power in the people’s hands’.

He said,

“There are important counter-trends to this –like encryption and cryptocurrency — that take power from centralized systems and put it back into people’s hands. But they come with the risk of being harder to control. I’m interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies, and how best to use them in our services.”

Although, till date, Facebook has not mentioned by when they would be using this technology on their platform, it is very clear that they are pursuing this field with keen interest and intend to use it for the benefits and good of mankind. It is going to be interesting to see how they would use this technology as well on their platform that has a very huge user base.